Enlarge/ Russian President Vladimir Putin said on August 5, 2019 that Russia would be "forced" to develop new missiles if the US does the same, after Washington pulled out of a Cold War-era nuclear arms deal. Now one of those weapons has caused a nuclear accident.

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On August 8, during testing aboard a barge in the White Sea near Nyonoksa, Russia, the nuclear engine of an experimental nuclear-armed cruise missile exploded, killing two technicians and injuring six others. On August 11, officials of the Russian nuclear agency Rosatom acknowledged that five employees had died in the explosion of what they described as "an isotopic power source for a liquid engine installation." The head of the nuclear research center, Valentin Kostyukov, called the five "national heroes."

As of today, it is believed that the death toll has risen to seven. The victims were described as suffering from burns, and most were thrown into the sea by the explosion; they all likely suffered from radiation burns.

Further Reading

Along with the Poseidon nuclear-powered torpedo, the missile—since named the 9M730 Burevestnik ("Petrel")—was a response to the United States' departure from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the continued development of ballistic missile defenses. Those defenses include the deployment of the US Navy's Aegis anti-ballistic missile capabilities ashore in Romania and planned future deployment in Poland.

The Burevestnik (which NATO reports under the name of SSC-X-9 "Skyfall") has been undergoing testing at Nyonoksa, in Russia's far-northern Arkhangelsk Oblast, since at least January of this year. Nyonoska has been the site of testing for submarine-launched ballistic missiles and other naval missiles since the 1960s and is near Severodvinsk—home to the shipyard where Russia's last aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, was severely damaged in a floating drydock accident. It is also the home to one of Russia's nuclear-submarine shipyards, where the mothership for the Poseidon torpedo was recently launched. The accident caused a 30-minute spike in radiation levels detected in Severodvinsk.

Déjà vu all over again

Rosatom officials' description of the engine as "an isotopic power source for a liquid engine installation" is a fairly oblique reference to a nuclear-missile engine. But as the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta pointed out, "This is a fairly precise description of Burevestnik's nuclear powerplant." The Burevestnik's propulsion is, according to Novaya Gazeta and other sources, a nuclear scramjet much like that originally envisioned for the US military's SLAM program of the early 1960s. That effort, which aimed at building a hypersonic cruise missile capable of dropping multiple warheads while flying at low altitude, was shut down by the Kennedy administration because the weapon was seen as too provocative.

Unlike SLAM's Tory nuclear engine, which relied on air passing directly through the nuclear core of the engine, the Burevestnik’s engine uses a liquid metal to both cool the reactor and transfer the heat to air passing through the scramjet. The US researched the use of metal and salt-cooled reactors for nuclear-powered jets and space-based nuclear reactors in the 1950s, but Russia soon took the lead, first deploying a lead-bismuth cooled reactor aboard the K-27 experimental submarine, launched in 1962.

Even with isolation of the nuclear reactor from direct contact with the air, however, the exhaust of such an engine would inevitably include some nuclear contamination—which is why Russia has been testing the Burevestnik offshore. It would be, as Novaya Gazeta described it, a "small flying Chernobyl."

The five killed in the accident—Evgeny Koratayev, Vyacheslav Lipshev, Sergei Pichugin, Alexei Vyushin, and Vladislav Yanovsky—have been posthumously awarded unnamed state honors.

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Sean Gallagher
Sean is Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Emailsean.gallagher@arstechnica.com//Twitter@thepacketrat

Probably much of this is just theater. Putin's Russia is tough-guy state, and a lot of his power is the perception of toughness. Competence is secondary. I'm tempted to sneer, but the US is going down the same route of late.

Sounds like Russia is giving HBO material to do a mini-series remake of Dr. Strangelove complete with a scene of a CIA spy enthusiastically riding the Burevestnik to its glorious end cowboy hat in hand.

Honestly, this is more confusing than anything else. As far as I'm concerned, it's interesting technology but a practical dead end. If you're already not flush with cash, why piss away the money on the system? In an amoral-dictator sense, it's not a valueless system, but any ruble you spend on this damn fool thing is a ruble you couldn't spend on something more practical.

I'd speculate it's a complete ruse, and all for show, but then we wouldn't have dead engineers and radioactive release on Russian soil.

The phrasing "isotope power source" is a bit worrying because that sounds more like an RTG-style system rather than a fission reactor.

It would be possible to build an radioisotope-thermal rocket engine, in theory, but you'd need to load it up with a really uncomfortable quantity of white hot highly active isotope with a short half life. A few dozen kilograms of polonium, for example.

If they've blown up an engine like that, their test site is unrecoverably fucked.

The phrasing "isotope power source" is a bit worrying because that sounds more like an RTG-style system rather than a fission reactor.

It would be possible to build an radioisotope-thermal rocket engine, in theory, but you'd need to load it up with a really uncomfortable quantity of white hot highly active isotope with a short half life. A few dozen kilograms of polonium, for example.

An engine which was so intrinsically thermally active would not only fly right from the factory, it would be flying inside of the factory.

Any RTG which can exist in practical solid form is limited to something like dozens of kilowatts, which you could lose in the energy budget of even a car engine, never mind a jet engine which must propel a very sizable cruise missile.

Honestly, this is more confusing than anything else. As far as I'm concerned, it's interesting technology but a practical dead end. If you're already not flush with cash, why piss away the money on the system? In an amoral-dictator sense, it's not a valueless system, but any ruble you spend on this damn fool thing is a ruble you couldn't spend on something more practical.

I'd speculate it's a complete ruse, and all for show, but then we wouldn't have dead engineers and radioactive release on Russian soil.

Maskirovka,build and test one at great expense,then claim to have hundreds more so as to make your citizens/enemies think you have more power than you actually have.

It's a shame they're developing an air-breathing nuclear thermal propulsion system, which has no practical applications, instead of a deep space NTP engine which would be useful for space exploration without posing unmitigable risks to terrestrial life.

The nuclear-powered cruise-missile program was announced by Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin on March 1, 2018, during an address to the Federal Assembly. Putin described the weapon as a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile with essentially unlimited range, intended to defeat any ballistic missile defenses deployed by the United States.

Thank you for the context, it took me a minute to realize "Oh, this was THAT missile."

The phrasing "isotope power source" is a bit worrying because that sounds more like an RTG-style system rather than a fission reactor.

It would be possible to build an radioisotope-thermal rocket engine, in theory, but you'd need to load it up with a really uncomfortable quantity of white hot highly active isotope with a short half life. A few dozen kilograms of polonium, for example.

An engine which was so intrinsically thermally active would not only fly right from the factory, it would be flying inside of the factory.

Any RTG which can exist in practical solid form is limited to something like dozens of kilowatts, which you could lose in the energy budget of even a car engine, never mind a jet engine which must propel a very sizable cruise missile.

I'm hoping this is just some linguistic quirk that sounds odd in English but in Russian it clearly implies a fission reactor.

The alternative would be insane. A radiothermal rocket is not impossible, but it'd be a terrible strategic weapon since you have to keep producing the isotope fuel constantly just in case you need to launch at short notice.

Cooling a reactor with liquid metal works pretty well,right up until some one turns the reactor off and the liquid metal solidifies in the pipes,Russia lost a couple of subs that way.

Well, to be technically correct (the finest kind), they didn't "lose them", because the subs were tied up alongside the pier. It's just that when the reactor is shut down without some source of external power to keep the coolant hot, the reactor is a write-off. And since the USSR/Russia didn't have the funds to cut the subs open and replace the reactors...

Cooling a reactor with liquid metal works pretty well,right up until some one turns the reactor off and the liquid metal solidifies in the pipes,Russia lost a couple of subs that way.

Well, to be technically correct (the finest kind), they didn't "lose them", because the subs were tied up alongside the quay. It's just that when the reactor is shut down without some source of external power to keep the coolant hot, the reactor is a write-off. And since the USSR/Russia didn't have the funds to cut the subs open and replace the reactors...